their westward progress. As a general thing, the hand to hand collections for such purposes have gone to new fields, while the princely gifts and the legacies have stopped in old fields near home, to enrich or embellish institutions already strong, and to lay more foundations, where they already are close neighbors to each other. If educating and Christianizing funds had been invested with the forethought which determines a good financial investment-where the greatest possible income is sure—more money, in benevolent channels, would have gone over the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. It would not be difficult to satisfy a board of Wall street and State street men, whether benevolent moneys should be invested in the east or in the west, for the highest dividends, on long time. Other things being equal, investments grow in proportion to the growth of population in the same place. Our

last national census showed for the preceding decade an increase of eighteen per cent, in the population of New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania-nine states-and an increase of thirty-four per cent. in the northwestern-fourteen states-and of forty-eight per cent. in the seven Pacific states. The western increase is about double the eastern, and the greater the farther we go back in the decades. That is, for results, a gift of $10,000 for the west is equal to one of $20,000 for the east, so extensive and open and prolific are those new and unoccupied fields. Humbolt informs us that a follower of Cortez first sowed wheat in America. He had but three kernels to begin with, which he had found in their supply of rice, but he planted it in the right place. The crop or "dividends" in 1880 were 459,483,137 bushels.

WILLIAM BARROWS,

BELPRE was founded in 1789 by an association of forty citizens of Marietta who were stockholders in the Ohio company. Nearly every house in the town was occupied by a former officer in the Revolutionary army, and all the gentlemen were warm friends and admirers of Washington.

He wrote of the members of the Ohio company: "No colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum. I know many of the settlers per

sonally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community." The place was originally called Belle-prairie. These old soldiers had a great fondness for names borrowed from the history or language of their generous French allies. The first dwellings erected were small log houses built along the bank of the Ohio river.* In them they spent a few happy, uneventful months, followed by

* The people lived on farms, and Belpre extended down the river for about twelve miles,

years of excitement and terror. The story of their lives is interesting not merely to the antiquarian and historical student, but a charming element of romance and adventure runs through it. These pioneers were men of intelligence and great force of character, of broad views and high aims-"Ohio yankees," as some of their unsympathetic neighbors derisively nicknamed them. The almost miraculous passage by congress, all things considered, of the wonderful ordinance of 1787 ("the second Declaration of Independence") prohibiting slavery and establishing free schools in the northwest, enabled them to realize their noble political ideal and found a larger New England beyond the Ohio.

The crops of 1789 in the Northwestern Territory were partly destroyed by an unseasonable frost, and the people of Belpre were threatened in the spring of 1790 with famine. They lacked a sufficient supply of meat as well as grain and vegetables. Few of them were good shots or accustomed to hunt, or they might occasionally have added. venison or game to their scanty stock of provisions. Afterwards such as could afford to do so, regularly employed professional hunters. For several weeks the settlers lived principally on moldy corn, bought at one dollar and fifty cents a bushel, which they ground in hand mills, the only mills to be found on the Ohio, cooked in maple sap and ate out of pewter or wooden dishes. Pewter

*

* At Marietta a large army coffee mill, owned by Colonel William Stacey, was in great demand, till a prominent citizen, Charles Greene, encouraged to do so by the Ohio company, built a floating mill on the Muskingum, protected from the Indians by the guns of Campus Martius and Fort Harmar.

was commonly used at that date, even by those who were not obliged to economize. They had, as a rule, a limited supply of other necessaries beside food. They had no kettles large enough to make molasses or sugar, which would have made their mush more palatable and nutritious. All heavy articles of metal, even nails, they were obliged to do without on account of the difficulty of transporting them across the mountains. In 1791, Captain Devoll built a floating mill, which was anchored in the middle of Backus', afterwards Blennerhasset's island, opposite Farmers' Castle. It relieved the people of a great deal of work. Some of the settlers during this miserable summer were reduced to the necessity of living on nettles, celandine and purslane. Those who had any ready money assisted their less fortunate neighbors. Wanton Casey was appointed overseer of the poor, in 1790, but returned to Rhode Island the same year, and I believe for some time had no successor. A generous farmer named Williams, who lived on the Virginia shore of the Ohio, no doubt saved many from starvation that summer. His crop the previous fall was abundant, and indignantly refusing the large prices offered him by speculators, he sold his corn at fifty cents a bushel to all who needed it, prudently and resolutely "proportioning the number of bushels according to the number of individuals in a family," and giving credit till better times to the many who had no money.*

* Hildreth's 'Pioneer History.' Nearly three thousand dollars were disbursed by the Ohio company during 1790, which the people called the "starving year," among sick and needy families.

After this gloomy year the crops were usually so large that the farmers found difficulty in disposing of them. There was no communication with the eastern market, and they could not consume all the grain themselves. It is said that to get rid of it they sometimes used it as fuel.

In 1791, the Indian War broke out. The people of Belpre abandoned their unprotected houses and took refuge in the newly built log stockade called Farmer's Castle. It was surrounded by a tall palisade of logs set upright in the ground, and had large, strong, heavy gates. Its towers and floating flag and numerous block houses presented an imposing and picturesque appearance, seen passing up or down the Ohio in boats. The fort was so strongly built and well defended by experienced Revolutionary soldiers that the inmates were in little danger, unless they ventured without the walls, from the Indians who lurked in the woods and watched it con

stantly for four years. Strict military discipline was maintained. The officer of the day inspected every part of the castle each morning, examined the water tanks placed in upper rooms of all the houses to be used in case of fire and saw that they were kept full, and reported all who disobeyed orders issued by the commandant. Offenders were obliged to submit to the infliction of the penalty they had incurred. A man who overslept himself and did not answer to his name at the sunrise roll call was ordered to cut a stump of a tree level with the ground, and as a result of this vigorously enforced penalty, at the close of the war

no stumps were to be seen around the stockade. The Ohio company shared the expense of the erection and defense of the stockade, which was built without national aid. During the war the company spent for military purposes without re-imbursement by the general government, $11,000. At Belpre were stationed two spies or scouts, selected from among the best hunters in the country, and a drummer and five soldiers, all in their employ.* The spies received one dollar a day and the soldiers eight dollars a month-twice the amount paid privates in the regular army.

After 1791, a company of United States troops, sent from the east to do garrison duty, assisted in guarding the stockades, a few men being stationed at each. McMaster says in his History of the People of the United States,' that there were only two hundred and eightyseven men in the country controlled by the Ohio company who could be collected and made to serve as soldiers. The pay was so small in the regular army that a good class of men could not be induced to enlist. The privates were a miserable set, usually too young or too old to do good service, ignorant of military discipline and neither hunters nor trappers; either unarmed or furnished with useless guns. And Major Ziegler testified on one occasion that they were also sometimes half naked and half starved. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Harmar and St. Clair were defeated! Farmer's Castle contained thirteen dwellings which were

* Colonel Sprout commanded the Ohio company's troops and the militia.

occupied as fast as they were finished. Two hundred and twenty persons were crowded into its block houses.*

In the winter of 1791 all the fat hogs owned by the people of Belpre were

*The following letter written from Fort Harmar, January 8, 1791, by Captain David Zeigler to Governor St. Clair, gives us an idea of the excitement and terror felt by the people on the Ohio at

this time: 'I have the misfortune to inform you that on the second instant in the evening, the settlements called Big Bottom, consisting of sixteen men, one woman and two children were destroyed by the savages and only two men escaped and three supposed taken prisoners, as the bodies were not found. As soon as I got acquainted, assisted Colonel Sprout to make a detachment with as many men as I possibly could spare toward the settlements; the Indians were gone before the party arrived. Since your departure no Indians had made their appearance here and they are to a great number at the Great Rock and at White Woman's creek. The fourth instant was the day I had appointed George White Eyes the old [Indian?] which is amongst us to go as far as said place, but now he is apprehensive of danger not only from them, but also from his own people, which obliges me to save him from trouble. Polly the Wyandot woman is also here and informed me the first instant, in a crying manner, that she apprehended all the savages were hostile inclined.

. . Since this unhappy affair the Ohio company voted troops to be raised for their defense and for such time until more troops will be sent to this post. They also voted three block houses to be erected; the troops so raised to have the same pay and rations (but no clothing) as the troops got last war in the service of the United States. This I am afraid will hurt the establishment. On application from the directors of the Ohio, in giving them assistance, shall order Ensign Morgan with fifteen men, on his return, to guard one of those block houses, and any other aid possible on my part they shall have. All our settlements must become more careful, other

wise they may meet with the same fate. The French families, I expect, will take shelter in this garrison.

The women and children in the different settlements will repair to said place. No new commissary has made his appearance yet, and of course no provisions.-'American State Papers, Indian Affairs, Volume I.

killed and hung up in an outhouse at Farmers' Castle, which was burned. The hogs which they had not killed but left running at large were about the same time driven off by the Indians. There was great dread of another famine, and the settlers accordingly hastened to contribute the little ready money they could collect, and hired two men to make the journey to Red Stone, western Pennsylvania, to buy salt meat. The river froze up, and though the agents escaped molestation from the Indians, they could not return till the February thaw, when to the great relief of the people in the stockade, who feared they had either proved dishonest or fallen into the hands of the savages, their quaint ark or "Kentucky boat" was one day seen approaching the water-gate with a load of much needed provision.

One of the pioneers, who was brought from Rhode Island to Marietta in her childhood, December, 1788, used to entertain her grandchildren with fascinating tales of these early times, including anecdotes of all the prominent men of the colony, and stories half pathetic, half humorous, of the deceived and disappointed emigrants from France, who proved valuable citizens. Hardships and dangers, as she looked back upon them, became romantic and heroic adventures, delightful to talk of. She described a cultivated New England gentleman, liked and respected by all, coming west nearly a hundred years ago, fresh from Paris, where he was educated, with his trunks filled with books and rich French suits of variously colored velvet and silk, for which he was in

haste to substitute more suitable, coarse, plain clothes borrowed from his less experienced pioneer friends. In 1805 the United States ransomed by the payment of a large sum of money the American prisoners taken from our ships by *Algerine pirates. Her young sailort brother, for a time a slave in Algiers, was one of those released from painful captivity and returned safely home. To the youthful imagination of her hearers, Rhode Island and the long road to Ohio, but especially all the Ohio country, was a sort of fairy land. The stockades were enchanted castles with solitary watchmen aloft in turrets, peering into the dusky fofests beyond the treeless clearings for skulking redskinned foes. But mystic and charming above all was the only highway of the land-the beautiful river with its barges full of soldiers or citizens, "floating down," as it were "to Camelot," through brilliant summer days or soft moonlight evenings, melodious with songs of pleasure-seekers. For seen only in fancy, the bare, unfinished frontier towns, surrounded by rough fields and unsightly stumps, were by the child's

*Captives in Algiers suffered great hardships. On landing in Africa they were led by a chain round the

neck to the slave auction, and sold to the highest

bidder. See 'Sumner's White Slavery in Barbary.'

+ Sometimes ships built at Marietta and carrying a cargo and crew from that neighborhood sailed down the Ohio and Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, and thence to foreign ports.

The Indians concealed themselves behind the

trees and fired with safety at their enemies. For this reason every tree near the stockade was cut down.

The young people were in the habit of singing when rowing on the Ohio river.

imagination transformed to loveliest villages of the plain, smilingly asleep amid gardens on the river's brink.

This lady was too young when the Indian war broke out to mind leaving her own home on the bank of the river at Belpre, or to be annoyed by the discomforts of the crowded block house, number five, Farmers' Castle, where two families besides her father's, twelve persons in all, were obliged to take refuge. But she was in her tenth year when the Indians carried off Major Goodale, the commandant of Goodale garrison, situated about half a mile from Farmers' Castle, and consisting of two block houses surrounded by a palisade to which, for the sake of more room, they had lately moved. This dreadful event made a deep and ineffaceable impression on her young mind. The sorrow and horror which she herself felt and witnessed in others were vividly recollected and often spoken of in her old age. He was an intimate friend of her parents, and his daughter had married a relative. Henceforth she, in a measure, shared her mother's apprehensions on the days when the big gates of the fort closed early in the morning on her father going forth with other inmates of the block shelter of the bullet-proof log walls, and houses to work in their fields beyond the exposed, as long as they remained without, to death or more horrible captivity among the Indians. Warned by the anxieties and sufferings of the year of famine, the inhabitants of the Belpre forts took turns in cultivating their farms and gardens, part going out into the unprotected country to work each